Making Neighbors

This was just very nicely put. It is from the blog Maine Family Robinson.

I'm still trying to get the hang of living in western Maine. When you move to a new place, especially a far-flung place, the mundane habits and traditions of the place are all new, and often obscure. Simple things like figuring out what day to put out the trash have to be re-learned from ground zero (Tuesday mornings. Unless there's a holiday)

The fish out of water story is a mainstay of American movies and TV, but I'm not a Clampett, and there are no Drysdales around here anyway. It's closer to the movie Big, in which Tom Hanks is transformed from a grade-schooler into an adult -- except it's the opposite; I’m still physically and intellectually an adult, but I’ve regained the sense of curiosity and wonder of a child, or perhaps a Japanese tourist. Everything and everybody can be interesting if they're unknown to you. There's a temptation to timidity, too. Hang back until you figure out where you fit.

Everyone has been most kind to us in our new home; it's not an insular place. People are amazingly friendly, and they walk everywhere, including past our house, and they stop to talk to you if you're out on the porch or up on a ladder. But then the winter comes.

People are really hardy around here, so winter holds no terrors for them. The reason New York City disintegrates into chaos if it snows a foot is that they've been pretending that winter will never happen for so long that it might as well be a meteor strike when it does show up. People in Rumford know it will snow, and get on with it.

The rocking chairs are in the cellar now, not on our Queen Anne porch, and the pedestrians are fewer, and they can't tarry so long when they're walking their dog because their feet get cold. Life turns inwards a bit.

It snowed pretty good two days ago. Steady, straight down snow all day and all night. My son and I went out in the streetlight's twilight, shoveling the drive in front of our house twice, trying to stay ahead of it. We knew it would snow all night, and we'd have to do it again in the morning, but if we didn't get some of it now it would be a bear in the morning.

Yesterday dawned warmish for around here in January, in the low thirties. It had been as cold as nine degrees below zero a week ago, and thirty felt balmy. But it had rained to finish the snowstorm, and it froze over before dawn. The snow was heavy near the house. It was a citadel's wall along the road where the plow did its work. My older son and I had a long morning of heavy work ahead of us to clear it.

Our neighbor Gayle came up the hill with her snowblower. She's lived here her whole life, and knows enough to have equipment to clear the drive. She took pity on us for the second time this season, and blasted the heavy, wet, snow over the already substantial banks while we cleaned up with our shovels. When we were finished, we went across the street and helped the college professor finish his walk and stairs. He lent me a rake to pull the snow off my porch roof, which is more like ten billion termites holding hands than a real structure. Gayle came back over and blasted this new pile of snow out of my dooryard, too. Dooryard is what they call a place just outside the house where you park around here.

She looked at me and asked, "What about Lloyd?" Lloyd lives next door, and is far from unfriendly, but he keeps almost entirely to himself. He lives alone. He is retired, but goes out every day in an ancient van and ferries people around for some sort of charity or civic good. Not sure exactly what it is.

Gayle and I talked it over. Lloyd wasn't home, so we couldn't ask him if he wanted help. And we'd figure he'd say no thanks, even if we could ask him. People are self-reliant here, and often prefer to be left to their own devices. We finally figured no one ultimately minds a kind gesture, and Gayle blasted the snow and my son and I shoveled around the edges. It was the Maine version of a prank, I guess. Instead of vandalizing his house when he wasn't home, we shoveled his driveway. 

I found it easy to imagine myself as the grasshopper of the old fable, not ready for winter while people like Gayle the ant have long since figured out how to take care of the inevitable. Only a fool would move to Maine and not have anything but a creaky back and a teenager to shovel the snow. Gayle would never give you the impression you were imposing on her, even though we were, with our very existence. I'm not used to being the Blanche DuBois of the neighborhood, but there it is.

Gayle was going back down the hill, heading home for a well-deserved rest, and I offered to carry the shovel she carried along with the snowblower. She noticed the fire hydrant across the street from her house was buried by the plow, and started blowing out around that, too. "We take turns doing it," she said, pointing to another neighbor's house. I waved goodbye and started back up the big hill to our house, a bit footsore, tired, and both sweaty and cold -- a bad combination, I thought.

Halfway up the hill, I saw another of my neighbors. I don't know her all that well. She has muscular dystrophy, or maybe cerebral palsy, I'm not sure which. Her limbs do not entirely obey her commands, and her speech is very slurred. In the summer, we used to see her riding a big tricycle up the hill and down to town, returning with groceries in a basket in the back. She can still drive, but I think she likes the exercise. Unlike people without a care in the world, she always appears to be happy.

I was sort of stunned. I stood there in the road a while, longer than I should have, doing nothing. It was like seeing a prisoner trying to tunnel out of a dungeon with a spoon. She had to hold onto the railing or tumble over, and was shoveling as best she could with her other hand. I weigh 175 pounds. I'm not elderly. I've worked construction for a good portion of my life. Her task would have tested me to my limit --maybe past it. If she weighs a hundred pounds, I'd be shocked.

I begged her to stop and let me do it. I yelled for my son to come and help. I asked her over and over to stop and let us do it, but she kept trying to keep going alongside us. Gayle was going up her own driveway, and saw us over there, and rolled her machine over.

Gayle knows her better than I do, of course. She asked where the man she lives with was. She told us he was in the hospital here in town. He's not an old man, much younger than I, but he had a pacemaker put in, and he was having some sort of procedure done on his heart's valve, because it wasn't helping.

"He's coming home today. He's going to call me. He was going to shovel when he got home." 

Jesus wept. I could mine a thousand libraries and not come up with words to describe the way the whole thing affected me. Gayle never flinched, just fired up the blower, and my son and I scraped and heaved, and we even moved cars around and cleaned them off. I put my creaky back into it like Charlton Heston gone to seed at an oar, while the whole thing ran around a little track in my head.

In many ways, I don't have a lot in common with my new neighbors. That is not because we're new here, and it’s certainly not their fault. I have never fully fit in anywhere. But I am honestly glad to see them when I sit on the porch on a hot summer's evening and wave as they walk by. They are amiable, and I hope I'm affable right back. No one is rich. There are no beautiful people. There is no way to be a big deal. Exactly how pleasant and solicitous of others you are is about the only pecking order I can discern. The postman is a king here, and wears his crown lightly.

Outside of this place I see my fellow citizens claw and spit at one another over trifles. They kill each other over slights that wouldn’t require an “excuse me” here. Lately it seems to me that half of the country would have driven past my neighbor with a Scrooge's dismissal of her plight on their lips, and the other half would have gone by going the other way, pretending not to see her, while hurrying to a rally to demand a surtax on someone else's money to start a No Snowshoveler Left Behind program.

Me? I was hoping that maybe, just maybe, someone was as glad to see me as I was to see them.